Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek movie seems like a punchline to a bad joke from an even weirder alternate universe. But it’s happening, and this week brings the news that the movie, which will be rated R, just got a very distinguished screenwriter.

Mark L. Smith, who penned Alejandro Inarritu’s The Revenant, has been chosen to write the script, per Deadline, in a move that’s quite different from Tarantino’s usual M.O. He prefers to write his movies himself, so this’ll be the first one that he doesn’t both write and direct. It’s unusual, but not shocking — it’s likely that the prospect of a franchise movie with decades of lore would be much simpler to direct if he did it the usual studio way instead of taking on all the tasks himself. I’m not sure how deep of a Trek fan Tarantino is, but another pair of eyes on this project wouldn’t hurt.

Tarantino’s Trek will also carry on his R-rating tradition, a bold move for a franchise sci-fi, but one that’s proved unexpectedly lucrative ever since Deadpool opened the floodgates. Apparently that was a promise made to Tarantino by both Paramount and J.J. Abrams, who will be producing the movie. Mark L. Smith caught Abrams and Paramount’s eye after he wrote the script for Overlord, a World War II film centered around D-Day that somehow also involves aliens and might be a Cloverfield movie. After that, a Quentin Tarantino Star Trek film probably sounded pretty straightforward.

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